How to Monitor Competitors’ Email Marketing
For ecommerce marketers seeking a competitive edge, monitoring competitors’ email campaigns can provide valuable insights and opportunities.
While many new businesses initially focus on advertising and search engine optimization, competitive monitoring often becomes a standard part of the marketing toolkit over time.
There are numerous email-tracking providers like Hoppy Copy, SendView, Owletter, and MailCharts that help in parsing, analyzing, and storing competitive email data.
With the aid of artificial intelligence, businesses can now track competitors’ email marketing using tools like the Zapier email parser and ChatGPT in just five simple steps:
- Sign up for competitors’ emails using a Gmail address.
- Automatically forward the received Gmail messages to the Zapier email parser.
- Utilize ChatGPT to extract relevant data from the parsed email message.
- Load the extracted data into platforms like Google Doc or Airtable.
- View the data in a business intelligence dashboard such as Looker.
It’s recommended to sign up multiple times for each competitor’s mailing list to receive segmented messages.
AI makes tracking competitors’ email marketing relatively inexpensive.
What to Track
Competitive tracking typically involves monitoring current activities for insights and identifying missed opportunities. Key areas to focus on include:
- Audience segments and personalization: Analyze if competitors send different messages to various segments.
- Email timing and frequency: Discover the optimal time for sending emails and frequency of promotional offers.
- Email sequences and triggers: Look at email sequences like welcome series and triggers for specific actions.
- Subject lines and preview text: Study competitors’ subject lines and preview texts for patterns and A/B testing.
- Content marketing: Examine how competitors use email to promote content or products.
- Deliverability: Monitor where competitors’ emails land and what affects their deliverability.
- Email technology: Identify the email service providers and tools competitors use, including AI-generated content.
- Promotional structure: Analyze competitors’ promotional offers and their repetition in emails.
Focus on areas that can enhance your email program and also look for opportunities to improve based on competitors’ strategies.
Successful Strategies
AI has revolutionized email monitoring, making it accessible and cost-effective for businesses of all sizes to track competitors’ strategies and improve their own email marketing efforts.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How can monitoring competitors’ email campaigns benefit my business?
By tracking competitors’ email campaigns, you can gain valuable insights into their strategies and identify opportunities to enhance your own email marketing efforts.
2. What tools can I use to track competitors’ email marketing?
Tools like Hoppy Copy, SendView, Owletter, MailCharts, Zapier email parser, and ChatGPT can help you track and analyze competitors’ email campaigns efficiently.
3. What are some key metrics to focus on when monitoring competitors’ email marketing?
Key metrics include audience segmentation, email timing, sequences and triggers, subject lines, content marketing strategies, deliverability rates, and promotional offers.
4. How often should I sign up for competitors’ mailing lists to receive segmented messages?
It’s recommended to sign up multiple times for each competitor’s mailing list to receive a variety of segmented messages and gain a comprehensive understanding of their email marketing tactics.
5. How can AI technology enhance competitive monitoring of email campaigns?
AI technology can automate the parsing and analysis of competitors’ emails, making it easier and more cost-effective for businesses to track and utilize valuable insights from their competitors’ email marketing strategies.
